1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a specimen preparation system and associated method for preparing blood-cell smears or the like for examination; in particular the invention relates to time-reduction improvement in the drying process part of a smear specimen preparation procedure carried out by the system prior to staining the specimens.
2. Description of Related Art
An example of a smear specimen preparation apparatus in which the processes from smearing blood onto glass slides to staining are automated is disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Pat. Publ. No. 8-271390. This apparatus uses cassettes for housing glass slides and solutions, smears blood on the glass slides to prepare smear specimens, stores the smear specimens into empty cassettes that are sent in one by one, and dispenses staining solutions into the cassettes to stain the blood cells.
To prepare neat, stably stained specimens, the smears on the glass slides must be sufficiently dried before staining. If there is no concern with process time, the specimens may be dried naturally for some length of time, for example, from one to a few hours. Toward raising processing speed, however, it is necessary to shorten the time for the drying procedure, which is prior to staining.
There is one method, for example, in which the specimens are cool-air dried in air blown by a fan. However, changes in the surrounding environment give rise somewhat to variations in the drying conditions (in hot or humid situations, insufficient drying is likely). Inconsistencies in the drying conditions will appear as inconsistencies in the staining conditions, which ultimately will affect the outcome of the stained specimens. Carrying out the staining process on an insufficiently dried smear specimen leads to unsatisfactorily stained, unclear specimens.
Sir John V. Dacie and S. M. Lewis describe a rapid staining method on pp. 54-55 of Practical Haematology, Sixth Edition (Churchill Livingstone, London, 1984). Nevertheless, what they note is related not to shortening drying procedure time, but rather to shortening the time for the subsequent staining procedure.